First medical visit

Today was my first visit to an Australian doctor. I have Medicare and private insurance (both Australian). When visiting a doctor here, I've been told you can look for an office that does "bulk billing" which means they don't charge anything out of pocket, and subsequently bill Medicare for your visit. OR, you can go to a doctor's office that doesn't do bulk billing, in which case you pay upfront and get reimbursed a portion of the fee from Medicare. For my visit, apparently, private insurance doesn't cover any of it. The visit was $65, Medicare will reimburse $36, and so the visit will cost me $29. The office said Medicare will mail me the check, but in the future I have the option of having it directly deposited into a bank account.

Bicycles, bicycles

There must be thousands of organizations in Australia that collect old bikes and do various things with them. In the US, this entire layer in unnecessary - any bike sitting unused for more than 1/2 hour gets stolen. The US system is much more efficient at getting bikes to needy individuals. What's on in Sydney?

What kind of dirt?

The soil in our backyard looks like hardpan clay? (I really don't know soil classifications). Anyway, it's bare dirt in some spots where nothing is growing, and the weeds and grass seem to grow just as well in the concrete cracks as they do in the soil. I thought I'd need to get a pickaxe to break through the surface.

So since it's been raining for 24 hours, I decided to stick a pitchfork into it and see what it looked like underneath. Surprisingly, it looks like fairly rich, black dirt - however, there's a layer of maybe 8" and then you hit some rocks. Also, most amusingly, when you break into it, even after 24 hours of rain, only a very thin layer of the dirt on top is wet. The rest is pretty dry. The water runs off the surface rather than soaking in. I've heard that if you put the leaves of some native trees in your compost, the leaves have a wax that will coat the surface of the soil, and that doesn't let the water soak in.

Ants

When the first English settlers planted a garden in what is now Sydney,  everything was devoured by ants.  The ants are still here.

Hot? ...or REALLY Hot?

How can you tell when it's really hot outside? When you turn on the cold water tap, and can barely keep your hand in the water that comes out because it's too hot. Apparently it was 109F in Sydney today, fairly dry, but then there were clouds and a thunder shower. The heat then rain left a nice herbal scent in the air, but also seemed to bring out the flies. I am rethinking my notion of insulating the hot water pipes - maybe I need to insulate the cold pipes as well?!

Obnoxious drunkenness

Oops - somebody shit in their own bed. Alcohol ban extended

Canterbury Cockroach

These seem to randomly run across the sidewalk here. cockroach video